The media treat it as something of a surprise that the ungrateful inmates of our refugee camps are rioting and committing suicide. But it does make for great headlines and, let’s face it, that’s mainstream journalism these days: the ‘gotcha’ rather than real investigation. Well, it is no surprise to psychologists who, had government taken the time to seek some good advice, could have easily predicted these events. In fact, if a research psychologist had wanted to design an experiment confirming the negative impact of incarcerating people, they could have done no better than the politicians and bureaucrats with the fiasco they have invented. The experiment has it all: desperate people; close confinement; razor wire; remote locations; removal of dignity an extended but variable process that engenders hopelessness; an unnatural existence; and overcrowding.

It has been long known in psychology that even relatively innocuous forms of incarceration cause psychological problems: an abnormal situation creates abnormal behaviour in and of itself. We know that guards become abusive towards inmates when they are in this unique position of power. The abuse of the powerless is not restricted to psychopaths or other similarly inadequate personalities. Mr and Mrs Average are quite capable of abnormal cruelty when given the opportunity. We see this in wartime, concentration camps, prisons and the now defunct (thankfully) psychiatric hospitals of the first half of the twentieth-century.

Any first year psychology student knows that you cannot expect people to behave normally when they are placed in abnormal situations. And we could expect people to riot when they are placed in a threatening situation. We can expect people to kill themselves or develop psychoses when their disbelief turns to despair turns to hopelessness. We can expect to see children rapidly wither on the vine when normality is stripped from them: they have few defences to protect themselves.

Successive Australian governments have failed the compassion test, as have we, the Australian people for not urging a humanitarian approach to this problem. This does not mean allowing illegal entry to our country. It does not mean opening our doors. But it does mean having a process for dealing with the problem that is in keeping with the mores of a twenty-first century civil society rather than those of the dark ages: a society that bases its decisions on evidence rather than false and convenient belief. I wonder if we are ready yet and is there a politician out there that is prepared to rise above the sorcery that is popularism?

Dr Stewart Hase

Dr Stewart Hase is a registered psychologist and has a doctorate in organisational behaviour as well as a BA, Diploma ofPsychology, and a Master of Arts (Hons) in psychology.

Watching Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott go at it is a lot like witnessing a couple trapped in the death throes of a hideous relationship. They’ve got to the point where verbal abuse is not a side issue: it’s the issue. Whatever the specific conflict, it gets buried in a hail of verbal salvos designed to accuse, blame, denigrate, manipulate, control, and put down.

The couple sees each other only as adversaries. Their goal is to bring the other undone, and achieve domination. They struggle to achieve this in some or all of the following ways:

The verbal abuser refuses to responsibly communicate. She or he establishes what can be discussed, or withholds information, making genuine discussion impossible. She or he can prevent any possibility of resolving conflicts by employing this blocking tactic.

Diverting from the matter at hand into abuse that the other then feels obliged to defend or return is another impediment to discussion of real issues. Climate change, the economy, gay marriage – no matter what the topic on the table, it is always subsumed under the couple’s compulsion to do one another in.

Doing the other one in has become the raison d’être of the relationship. In a worst-case scenario, it has become the participants’ entire reason for getting up in the morning, and has taken on the qualities of a life-controlling addiction.

A verbal abuser will often accuse his or her partner of some wrongdoing or breach of the basic agreement of the relationship. This always distracts from the current issues, and puts the partner on the defensive.

Then there’s judging and criticizing. The verbal abuser may express their critical judgment of their partner. This is often disguised as being helpful and when in enacted in that form, can be particularly insidious as any retaliatory accusation of wrong-doing can be disingenuously denied, as in “Wot, me?”

Sometimes verbal abuse is disguised as jokes. While the comments may be presented as humor, they have poisoned barbs. They may be delivered inelegantly, or with great skill, but their intention is to diminish the partner, and throw her or him off balance.

Trivializing can also be a form of verbal abuse. Trivializing is the attempt to make what the partner has said or done, insignificant. This tactic can be quite hard to identify and name, although you know immediately and viscerally when it’s happening to you, and it makes you want to hit back, or crawl under a stone, depending on your particular learned method of self protection.

Undermining is another tactic. The abuser will attempt to slaughter an idea or suggestion with a few pointed comments, or derisive laughter.

Name-calling is also a classic tactic of the verbally abusive, as is reference to the hated other’s appearance, mannerisms, and past mistakes.

All these tactics can be employed in the privacy of home, or in public, often at dinner parties and barbeques, because couples in this state do best with an audience. An audience offers a golden opportunity to shame the other, and hopefully get somebody else on side. So delusional are couples by this stage, that they really do think what they say is taken seriously by those poor sods unwittingly subjected to their folie à deux. They have no idea that all anybody wants is for them to leave and never come back.

It can be disconcerting to be anywhere near couples dedicated to destroying one another. It can remind you uncomfortably of your own parents, or adults you knew as a child who were set on this path. It isn’t unusual, unfortunately, and having to witness it in adult life can provoke flashbacks.

In a verbally abusive relationship, there is no specific conflict. The issue is the abuse, and this issue can never be resolved. There is no possibility of closure.

Kate Ellis, Minister for the Status of Women, launched a 12-year national plan last month that is designed to reduce violence against women and children.

The plan is based on research that indicates as many as one in three Australian women will experience physical, sexual and emotional abuse by men during their lifetimes.

The plan expresses the intention to address social norms and practices, rigid beliefs about gender role expectations and cultural values, all of which contribute to a society in which violence against women and children is endemic. Currently, there are more reported assaults on women by men.

However, what the plan completely neglects to address is that there is also a great deal of anecdotal evidence that women are the primary perpetrators of the emotional abuse of children, with disastrous and long-lasting effects.

Any 12-year national plan to prevent violence against children should include proper and full investigation into this type of child abuse. Why doesn’t this one?

Paucity of empirical research

While there are studies on female violence against male partners, it’s difficult to find current research on the occurrence and effects of maternal emotional abuse on children, and on the adults they become. Research has lagged behind clinical experience, notes the author of this 2007 study and there is a relative paucity of empirical data.

Yet there is a plethora of anecdotal evidence to be found on the long-term effects of maternal emotional abuse on the development of children, and on their adult lives.

There are thousands of personal stories of emotional abuse – maternal bullying, attacks on the young child’s self esteem, the long-term consequences of being raised by a narcissistic mother for whom one is little more than an accessory in public, and an emotional whipping post in private. This clinical term has been colloquially adopted as shorthand for maternal emotional abuse.

There are 10 Google pages dedicated to the term, and a further 10 pages dedicated to maternal emotional abuse. The term “narcissistic mothers” sits comfortably with increased societal concerns about the “sexualisation” of young children, specifically when young girls are dressed and made up as if they were adult women.

However, the elephant in the room is that mothers and female caregivers overwhelmingly purchase and dress young girls in this manner. Reist, the ACL, and many other campaigners apparently find it easier to lay all blame at the door of various media and advertising outlets.

They neglect to mention the responsibility mothers and female caregivers must bear for purchasing these products, and choosing to dress their little girls like adult women. It’s reasonable to investigate the possibility that such mothers and caregivers are indeed abusively acting out their own narcissistic and unrealised desires through their little girls.

Maternal abuse is a broad predictor of adult dysfunction in the areas of relatedness, identity, affect regulation, abandonment concerns, and borderline and anti-social features. Briere and Rickards found that “high paternal support did not appear to reduce the negative effects of maternal abuse”.

On the matter of childhood sexual abuse the authors note: For example, the current results suggest that childhood sexual abuse, although significantly related to impaired self-capacities, is second to the effects of childhood maternal abuse. (emphasis mine.) Such data does not mean that sexual abuse is less than psychologically toxic, but rather that another form of child maltreatment—one less addressed in the literature—may be even more traumagenic. Additional study is clearly indicated to determine the reasons (whether biological, attachment-related, or sociocultural) for this specific effect.

The area is almost a professional and wider societal no-go zone – so thoroughly has feminism succeeded in creating the belief that the perpetration of intra-familial abuse is a primarily male phenomenon. Yet there are many, many women and men who experientially know this is not so. Why don’t feminists who are in a position to do so, validate this experiential knowledge, and clamour for empirical research?

W Kierski addresses professional reluctance in his paper ‘Female violence: can we therapists face up to it?” This link appears to come and go, but Google “female violence” and you’ll find this paper, and 11 further pages with both scholarly and anecdotal material on the topic.

The reality many feminists resist

Together with society’s reluctance to consider that mothers are anything but good, as well as the difficulties of identifying what can seem, compared to physical injuries, a nebulous concept of emotional maltreatment, this area of abuse receives far less attention than others. It is described by some mental health professionals as the “hidden” form of maltreatment.

Unpopular as this notion might be, it’s my opinion that feminism has created a simplistic but powerful binary narrative in which men are perpetrators and women are victims. This has now hardened into a rigid gender role expectation.

There is very little room in this story for the reality of female violence against male partners, against other women, and against children, unless a woman murders them or otherwise physically abuses them in a manner worthy of media attention. These women are then cast in the role of the extremely bad mother, and frequently subjected to vitriolic public attacks.

Yet victims can also be perpetrators, regardless of their gender. This is the reality many feminists resist, to the detriment of all of us, and in particular, our children. The halcyon days of brilliant feminist scholarship and subsequent ground breaking cultural change are over. The once inspirational ideology has degenerated into little more than housework and lipstick cat fights.

The first feminist clique to address the issue of maternal emotional abuse, and lobby for urgent and comprehensive research into its occurrences and effects, will receive my support. Feminists have always led the way in addressing domestic violence perpetrated by men – now it’s time for women to address intimate partner violence and child abuse by women.

This is not something women would accept being addressed by men. It can only be seriously addressed by women ourselves.

What we know so far is that there is very good reason to investigate. If further study bears out the 2007 Briere and Rickards’ data, we are looking at a profoundly significant determiner of adult well being, one at least equal in its probabilities of long-term damage to male perpetrated domestic violence, and the sexual assault of children.

Facing up to and addressing maternal emotional abuse is quite possibly feminism’s next frontier, and if the sisters baulk at it and stay with the trivia, then what is feminism really good for in 2011?

Domestic violence refers to acts of violence that occur between people who have, or have had, an intimate relationship. While there is no single definition, the central element of domestic violence is an ongoing pattern of behaviour aimed at controlling a partner through fear, for example by using behaviour which is violent and threatening. In most cases, the violent behaviour is part of a range of tactics to exercise power and control over women and their children, and can be both criminal and non-criminal.

Female violence against intimate male partners, well researched for quite some years now, and alleged by some researchers to be as common as male violence, and often differently expressed, is inexplicably omitted.

Maternal violence of any kind against children is omitted, though paternal or male violent behaviours against “women’s” children are included in the definition.

Further in the document we find this:

It [the Plan] will look at building positive attitudes and beliefs, social norms and ways for organisations to confront controlling, macho, aggressive and ultimately violent behaviour.

Read: “Violent male behaviour, because with “macho” in there, what else could it be?

The vision of the National Plan is that: ‘Australian women and their children live free from violence in safe communities.’

Read: “free from male violence” as female violence is not acknowledged in the definition.

And then: Values and Principles are: Responses to children exposed to violence prioritise the safety and long term well-being of children.

Read: “Responses to children exposed to male violence’, as female violence is not acknowledged in the definition.

And then: Protecting Children: Physical abuse, emotional maltreatment, neglect, sexual abuse and witnessing family violence are now all recognised as forms of child abuse and neglect. In April 2009, COAG endorsed Protecting Children is Everyone’s Business—National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children 2009–2020. This framework is aimed at reducing child abuse and neglect in Australia over time. The National Plan and the National Framework are designed to work in tandem to bring about positive change for women and children experiencing violence.

Read “ experiencing male violence.”

The linking of the two plans suggests the National Framework might also be based on an interpretation of domestic violence as male violence. I haven’t checked. I hope I’m wrong.

And: The primary objective of perpetrator interventions is to ensure the safety of women and their children.

We need a plan that addresses violence perpetrated on children by both women and men that includes physical abuse, emotional maltreatment, neglect, sexual abuse and witnessing family violence.

We need research into maternal emotional abuse of children. We need research into female intimate violence. We need a plan that acknowledges the realities of domestic violence, not one based entirely on out-dated stereotypes of gendered violence.

After forty years of treating domestic violence as a male only phenomenon, there has been no significant decrease in violence and child abuse statistics. This indicates that there is something we are not investigating, and female violence against intimate partners and children is very likely it.

In the famous book and movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nurse Ratched thoroughly runs the roost. From a Jungian archetype perspective Nurse Ratched represents the dominating and emasculating mother. Her main modus operandi is to manipulate the male patients into believing that their welfare is her primary concern and that everything she does is for their benefit. With this backdrop of apparently caring intention, she holds tightly onto control in the guise of benefactor and protector from the evils of the world. The most mischievous component of her behaviour, however, is to build up expectations for rewards in the form of activities, treats or even positive attention from her as a projection of their mother, and then shatter them at the last moment. It is consummate controlling and deeply obsessive behaviour. When McMurphy (Jack Nicholson in the movie) challenges Nurse Ratched by emancipating the patients and shows signs of winning the battle for control, he is lobotomised.

Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratched character is based in reality. I actually saw this archetype in the real world when working in a psychiatric hospital in Western Australia in the early 1970s. In my case Nurse Ratched was a male. So, what follows is equally applicable to both sexes but I refer to Nurse Ratched as female throughout to be consistent with the fictional character and, hopefully, not for any other unconscious desire.

by Corey Bond via flickr

Some recent research I have conducted with colleagues suggests that the Nurse Ratched archetype is alive and well in organisations other than psychiatric institutions. It appears in various configurations and degrees but has the same end game, which is to control the inmates: to keep them in their box. This reinforces Nurse Ratched’s sense of power, strengthens the mask that hides a deep-seated insecurity, a poorly developed sense of self and a sense that all is not well with herself, and, hence by projection, the world. Nurse Ratched has developed a set of behaviours that serve to protect her from seeing her true self and the maintain the illusion that others can’t see it either.

Nurse Ratched is a micromanager. Nothing is left to the deliberations of others. Of course there are committees, although one might find precious few of them and they are functionally impotent. This impotence is openly reinforced by Nurse Ratched who frequently overwrites their decisions using an unwritten but thoroughly understood power of veto. All decisions no matter how minute and trivial such as office allocation and travel claims are made by this manager: nothing is left to chance.

The archetype is surrounded by supplicants who have been handpicked to ensure that they do not challenge in any real way. Most importantly they all toe the party line. Dissidents are seen as not being loyal and either micromanaged or managed out. Members of the management group are found on most committees in the organisation. Committee membership has less to do with expertise and more to do with ensuring control. Loyalty is much more important then ability to be appointed as an acolyte. Even the most appalling manager and bully will be supported as long as they are loyal, get the job done and make Nurse Ratched look good.

Nurse Ratched makes sure that appointments are carefully managed. Selection panels are small and consist of herself, a couple of acolytes and a rep from HR. It is important not to have someone on the committee with expertise in the area of the appointment. Lower levels of staff are never involved in the selection process. It is not unusual for Nurse Ratched to veto an appointment and tap someone on the shoulder either within or from outside the organisation. Nepotism is so commonplace that it is taken to be normal. It is one of the rare instances where the manager does not employ a clone of self. There is room for only one Nurse Ratched in an organisation.

Information flow is carefully managed by our archetype. Most critical information is held by the management group and does not filter down: there is a hard communication barrier between senior management and the inmates. The acolytes realise that their survival depends on making sure that only selected information is sent upwards. Meanwhile Nurse Ratched is fed a diet of misinformation from employees dotted around the organisation that are the result of the nepotistic and political appointment processes. There is nothing like pillow talk to sink an upstart’s reputation.

Nurse Ratched likes to make sure the inmates are busy: extremely busy. Staff levels are kept to a minimum, performance expectations are high and there is little room for diversion from the key tasks of the business. This archetype depends on looking good in front of the board or shareholders and this is achieved by ensuring positive business outcomes no matter what the cost to people or organisational climate. There is a Calvinesque austerity and lack of celebrations of success are rare and token. Nurse Ratched depends on an efficient and well-run ward. In the movie McMurphy’s joie de vive is a major irritant and is finally silenced by reducing him to a vegetable. With such a threat people become malleable.

The result of this archetype’s behaviour is an adversarial, ‘us and them’ culture. The ‘management team’ interpret any discontent as being due to the implicit failing of the inmates and not the result of dysfunctional leadership and a toxic culture. The inmates should be grateful: let them eat cake.

Widespread cynicism pervades the organisation underpinned by powerlessness. Some inmates, like the Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, find a way to escape-he throws a water cooler through the window and runs away. In less potent expressions of their disappointment, the more imaginative and stronger personalities soon see the organisation for what it is and fly the coop. There are others who don’t quite understand the culture and innocently push back. But they are soon put in their box one way or another by being micromanaged to death, assigned meaningless tasks, and/or subtly bullied. Many are trapped due to circumstances and suffer the same pathology as Seligman’s dogs, learned helplessness that manifests itself as depressive behaviour. Denial and rationalisation of their situation help maintain a tolerable level of mental health in many.

People being people, they will in even the most adversarial environment find a way to let their creative juices flow and mostly find satisfaction in doing well what they often love doing. This is tolerated as long as the widgets continue to be churned out and there is not too much dysfunction. In fact Nurse Ratched rewards this behaviour with acknowledgement, which is gratefully received from inmates starved of recognition and positive reinforcement. But beware if the light shines too bright or the irrelevance of the activity to Nurse Ratched’s agenda is brought to her attention, the tit-bits are quickly withdrawn. After all, it is for the inmates’ own good.

This is the most toxic aspect of the culture that Nurse Ratched presides over and is the hallmark of the ultimate bully: the manipulation of the human need for recognition. The bully keeps the other in a state of constant desire for acknowledgement by maintaining a high level of disappointment, an air of disapproval. The victim’s diminishing self-esteem cries out for recognition and is occasionally, momentarily rewarded. The rush of pleasure increases desire for more and the person works even harder even as the tsunami of disappointment washes them away yet again.

Such is the dark side of organisations.

Dr Stewart Hase

Guest author Dr Stewart Hase is a registered psychologist and has a doctorate in organisational behaviour as well as a BA, Diploma of Psychology, and a Master of Arts (Hons) in psychology.